A boy and his Drone (Walkera furious 320)

Hey guys, new enthusiast here and I'm in need of some help.

First of all, some background. I've always been geeky and nerdy but never really into flight all that much, I preferred cars and other land based vehicles. A while ago after I got my first car and started exploring the joys of driving (reasonably) fast on twisty roads. Then I heard about drones (which weren't a thing back then) and it got the cogs in my head turning...what if I could have this little helicopter driving let's say 100m in front of the car, giving me basically a few second insight into the future. Car's coming. Deer about to leap across the road. Cops with speed cameras. Alas, they were several thousand bucks at that point so I just moved on and filed the idea for later.

Cue later. Much later. This December I bought a new car, one I've been in love with for close to 10 years now and quite by accident I saw some drones for sale and they seemed fairly affordable so I started digging around. Now the speed I was aiming for was 80ish km/h which is reasonable for twisty roads and fairly dynamic driving. Googling different drones, my mind first went to ''racing''. Yeah, that means they're going to be fast right? Racing things are always fast. Looking at drones, 80% of them didn't have top speed quoted. The ones that did...50km/h seemed to be fast for racing drones. Sad face. I mean 50 km/h is not slow but not quite what I was hoping for. Digging deeper, I found out racing drones are mostly made for manoeuvrability not outright speed since they have to bob and weave in fairly tight obstacle courses (correct me if I'm wrong). Some more digging and I came upon what was to be my first drone. Walkera furious 320.

First thing I noticed. Top speed 120km/h. I was sold right there. Price: 600ish quid with Devo 10 controller. Not cheap but can I afford it? Meh, one only lives once, I may as well. Ordered it, hoped customs wouldn't rip me off another 100 pounds (they didn't!) and about 10 days later, I had it. Bingo. Opened the box, everything in order, first flight scheduled for the next day.

Now at this point I should mention I did a fair bit of research, read and watched many reviews so buying this drone wasn't an ad hoc decision. I also didn't miss the bit where it said: not suitable for beginners but I figured...I'm a nerd. I've driven a lot, including tons of RC cars when I was a kid. I'm 28 and my life is still organized in a way that allows me as much free time as possible to pursue my passions. I love this sort of stuff. How hard can it be?

1 flipped drone and 2 broken rotors later, turns out it's not that easy at all. The fact the controller has what, 20ish buttons and I had no idea what half of them do even after reading the manual several times over should have been a giveaway. So not wanting to completely annihilate my expensive new toy because I'm a newb and suck at flying, I did the only thing that made sense to me at the time. Got more drones.

2 weeks later and a bunch of time spent on an online auction house, I had 13 more drones. Yes, 13. I may have gotten carried away with bidding a bit but in my defence, I paid about 90 pounds for all of them. This collection includes 1 Propel Atom, 4 Propel Quarks, 6 Propel Neutrons (love these), 2 big-ish Chinese HD camera drones with no brand name. A month after that I also picked up 12 Hubsan Quads nano micro drones. As you can probably tell I took this practice thing quite seriously.

I am now flying everything but Walkera which I still dare not touch, I'm not utterly rubbish at flying anymore and I'm getting better by the day. Will take a lot more skill till I can scout country roads in front of a sports car but I'm getting there. One interesting thing I found out (the hard way) is that in ground vehicles, when sh*t hits the fan you hit the brakes and and long as that doesn't lock up the wheels it's usually the best possible thing to do. Do that on a flying drone and...it drops like a rock. Pretty much the worst possible thing to do. It's a reflex I'm still getting rid of.

Part 2 of this operation, again something that presented a lot more trouble then I initially thought is setting up FPV. Looking back I don't really know how I imagined it would work but the image in my head was something like: ''I will fly my drone in front of the car at 100ish km/h (it's easy right?) projecting a picture from its camera to my tablet mounted in the car''. FPV style. Now the tablet's already there and serving as a sat nav when I need it, it's a Nexus 9 so it's fairly new and I didn't anticipate any trouble in setting it up. Then I asked a bunch of people how to do it, including FPV guy (the drone reviewer) and the general consensus was: you can't FPV with your tablet silly. Which made no sense to me so I kept digging.

Eventually came upon this: I now made the the exact same rig, the only piece of the puzzle left is to figure out how to power the receiver and how to sync drone's camera with it. Former should be doable with some more googling and paypaling, latter with begging for help from people who know more about it then me (or just...using what common sense and tech savvy I have). For what it's worth, initial tests proved satisfactory, the whole rig works and it's eagerly awaiting input from one of the 8 channels.


This is where the story almost ends so far. One last thing though. I'm obsessed with customizing. I like to leave a mark on things I own and use, make them unique and 'mine'. Not long ago this whole project seemed like a crazy wet dream to me and everyone I shared it with, now it's more then 90% done and most of the things I still need to finish up have to do with me learning about them or figuring out how it works, not if it's possible to do it in the first place. Apart from a paint job I don't intend on doing much to the drone just yet (I'll be busy tinkering on my RX8 for a while) but there is one thing that's bugging me. The battery.

The stock 2600 mAh should be good for just south of 10min of flight time. That doesn't seem like a lot but after flying drones for a month or two now, I found out it's actually not that bad. 100% focus on something takes its toll. But it'd still like some more, 15-20 min should do it. So a 5k-ish mAh battery would be perfect. Or...you know, two of those. I found a bunch of deals on eBay like this but the problem is all 3k+ batteries have deans plugs and I need xt60. Is swapping plugs possible or will it mess everything up? Before drones piqued my interest I knew jack sh*t about electricity, volts & ampers and what have you and I'm slowly learning as I go now but I'm not comfortable swapping plugs and stuff without someone who knows what he's doing assuring me it'd be fine. So any advice on the matter would be more then welcome. Can I buy big batteries and swap out plugs, is there another more elegant solution?

Some more pictures and a warm hello from cold windy England.

Cheers guys

S'tan

 

That didn't even cross my mind but it does look like the simplest solution, the plugs that is. I'll get some and report on success or lack of, thank you!

I just got a soldering kit to repair a Neutron I crashed and some Quarks that weren't working to being with so I'm fairly new with those tools as well but I have to learn somewhere. If possible not at the expense of 600 quid drone though so I'll leave that for later.

Cheers for the reply